


The Bridegroom and the Fly

by gabrielandworms



Category: Original Work
Genre: Anal Sex, Animal Death, Body Horror, Bugs & Insects, Cannibalism, Exophilia, Major Illness, Multi, Nonbinary Character, Oral Sex, Other, Pregnancy, Rimming, Teratophilia, Torture, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:20:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27305482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gabrielandworms/pseuds/gabrielandworms
Summary: Elazul flees to his ancestral home, the Corpse Grove Manor, in order to escape a plague. Unfortunately, the house contains greater threats than the disease outside, and each new secret proves to be more dangerous than the last.
Relationships: Elazul Anthony/The Reveler
Kudos: 3





	1. The Reveler

**Author's Note:**

> I had told myself that I was going to have, at the very least, this first part posted on Halloween, and I am making this goal. I don't know how much appeal this story will have to anyone that's not myself, but if there's at least one other person that enjoys it then... mission accomplished, I guess?
> 
> This story will wind up with more tags as the rest of the chapters are uploaded. That's going to be inevitable, but I wanted to add the ones that I knew would definitely become relevant.

White roots, thin and delicate like vessels woven through flesh, sprouted from the dark earth and dangled from cavern’s ceiling. The revelers collected around them as they siphoned what little sustenance they could pry from the flora above. They were an oddity, so deep in the recesses underground, as they lounged in their attire of brilliant jewel tones, of satin and velvet and lace.

They didn’t care about how their luxurious costumery clashed with their earthen home for, indeed, the clothes were part of the masquerade that had permeated every aspect of their identities. They were akin to mannequins, devoid of personality on their own. While adorned in such excess they could latch onto the illusion of being human. They could steep themselves in a fantasy of baroque hedonism.

The revelers could ignore their carapaces when they were obscured by jackets and gowns. They could pretend their hinged joints were instead composed of bone and tendon. They could even attract attention away from their compound eyes, even their mandibles so carefully carved into the mockery of plush human lips.

They could pretend to be more than just the first creations of the Lord of the Corpse Grove.

The Lord’s second creation, on the other hand, did not suffer the same anxieties as the revelers. She laid upon that bone-white altar in the center of the vast cavern, visible to all of the attendants. Her flesh was warm, yielding, and so unlike the chitinous shells of the revelers. Her eyes were threads of brown and amber surrounded by an abyss darker than the cavern itself.

The woman was the second of the creations, and she existed as a consort to the Lord, to provide it companionship so deep within the earth. She was the newest masterpiece of a creature enamored with humanity. The Lord had little to preoccupy itself with in the confines of its earthly prison, and as such it thought of nothing but the people that walked the surface. It dreamed of their compassion and cruelty, of their brilliance and ignorance, of their passion and apathy. The Lord of the Corpse Grove saw the mosaic of the human experience and found beauty in its entirety.

But no human could thrive so close to the Lord. It existed entirely in the realm of the Other. While time plodded along slowly and consistently above ground where the humans thrived, it contorted into a tangled web around the Lord. While the successes and failures of humanity could be accessed in one straightforward reality in the world above, they could not once they entered the that cursed domain. A simple house could be split into multiple layers of existence within the grasp of the Lord of the Corpse Grove, each one more peculiar than the last.  
  
As such, no human could ever slip into the embrace of the Lord without their mind eroding into an amalgamation of distorted thoughts. The Lord had tried a few times in the past to procure a human companion; it had lured stray wanderers into the depths of its lair, but they’d never survived long. Because of this, the Lord had decided to create its own version of humanity. It had decided to sate its loneliness by sculpting new creatures that not only resembled humans both physically and intellectually, but could also withstand the incomprehensibility that enshrouded the Lord of the Corpse Grove.

For a while, the Lord’s only success was the revelers, but they were flawed in both their appearance and minds. They were nothing more than insects playing the roles of humans in a scripted performance. They were merely actors.

The woman upon the altar was different. She wasn’t an insect dismantled and reassembled into a mockery of the human form. Save for the few deliberate alterations, she was human.

A weary and delirious moan left the woman as her thighs strained. Her belly was so round and swollen that she appeared to be on the verge of bursting, but even as another contraction rolled through her she exhibited no sign of pain. Her glassy-eyed gaze was unfocused, and her sweat-dampened hair clung to her waxy forehead. She was a living sculpture dedicated to exhaustion as her body strained again and again.

The revelers were more interested their feasts, and they only occasionally turned from the root-infested walls to gaze upon the woman. Pregnancy was an impossibility for them, and as a result her labor was an entirely foreign struggle.

Her baby, unlike most other newborns, did not cry when it finally entered that dark world. In fact, it didn’t resemble most newborns at all. The baby’s thin, translucent skin marked by segmented indentations—as well as its stubby limbs—bore a stronger resemblance to a maggot than anything human. The woman did not care though. Even in her fatigue she took her child into her shaking arms.

The Lord of the Corpse Grove also did not care. The infant, after all, was still human enough to be sculpted into the image that it yearned for. It could be molded into something more human. A second consort could be formed.

* * *

Elazul J. Anthony, son of Elizabeth M. Anthony, had spent his childhood in the massive Corpse Grove Manor. Despite this, he knew surprisingly little about the house that he’d inherited from his great-grandmother, Eleanor M. Anthony.

The Corpse Grove Manor was less a house and more a labyrinth of increasingly bizarre rooms. The long halls twisted and turned throughout the building with a logic only known to Elazul J. Anthony’s great-grandfather, Solomon J. Anthony. The man had been a famous architect, though the Corpse Grove Manor was a departure from the straight-forward rationale of his previous work. Elazul spent day after day uncovering new hallways and rooms to explore, and despite his thirty years of life as the heir to the Anthony family’s legacy, he was certain that he had yet to discover every secret within the manor.

Solomon’s last—and most perplexing—project, the manor, was a puzzle comprised of what appeared to be an endless supply of interconnecting pieces. And no matter how many rooms Elazul uncovered, he never could form the entire picture that was the Corpse Grove Manor.

Each room he did find, however, proved to be more bewildering than the last. On his first day as the official owner of the Corpse Grove Manor, he had found a ballroom decorated entirely in polished black stone and red velvet. He’d also found a bathroom with a sculpture of a sexual display between two men located within the vast tub itself, all delicately carved muscles and sinews. And he’d even found a fire-orange bedroom with the walls lined with the shadow boxes of unrecognizable insects.

One kitchen had a pantry filled entirely with poisons in aging bottles. On the second floor he’d unearthed a gallery dedicated to torture devices throughout history, with even the oldest of the contraptions lovingly maintained. He’d even discovered a tapestry woven entirely out of human hair in an exceptionally dusty library. And all the rooms were alive with color, from the black of the night sky to the brilliant yellow-orange of saffron. In that regard the rooms were very much unlike the bleak forest that loomed outside the manor’s walls.

Elazul struggled to recall if the manor had always been home to such preposterous collections and winding paths. The house had seemed ordinary enough in his youth, with nondescript rooms and muted colors. In fact, the only part of the house from back then that Elazul could recall as being strange was the chapel.

The chapel was still an unusual part of the Corpse Grove Manor, though the reasons for its peculiarity had shifted. While the chapel had seemed outlandish and unnecessary in the days of Elazul’s childhood, the room now seemed too quiet, bare and subdued.

As Elazul understood it, the chapel had been constructed as the behest of his great-grandmother. She had only passed away a handful of months ago, but Elazul never thought of her as she was at the end of her life, with her corpse lovingly displayed in a casket of dark oak and white velvet. He thought of her as she had been in his youth, with a tall stature and smooth face that defied the many decades of her life.

In fact, she’d been vibrant and ageless even on the day when she’d introduced him to the chapel.

* * *

“Our home is built on cursed land,” Eleanor told him as she seated herself upon one of the chapel’s plain wooden benches. White walls—uninterrupted by not so much as a single window—surrounded them. “The trees that grow here can’t pull their sustenance from the sun, not one of them, and yet, somehow, they continue to survive. It’s because they’re parasites, letting their roots grow farther and farther into the world as they look for any forest or field to feed upon.”

Elazul’s legs were too short to reach the ground, and they dangled in the air. The bench was uncomfortable, and he found himself unable to remain still. He fidgeted again and again. “Make them sound like vampires,” he commented.

“Vampires,” Eleanor repeated. Elazul caught the intrigued lilt of her voice. “I suppose they are. They certainly have the look of a dead man that’s come to life.” She looked around the chapel then, as though the walls reminded her of the equally pallid woods outside.

“That would make us vampires as well,” she eventually continued. “The Anthony family is bound by the same curse as the forest itself. We were chosen as the caretakers of the Corpse Grove, so my ex-husband had this home built before he died. That way we would never be too from from this land. Being a caretaker is a difficult task, and not one I would willingly bestow upon my children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren… but the curse does not allow a different path for us. Unfortunately, your mother didn’t believe in the curse, and so she’d met her misfortune when she tried to leave the family’s obligations.”

* * *

A heavy sigh left Elazul. He wanted nothing more than to disperse the memory; he didn’t want to think about his mother. Elizabeth M. Anthony’s death had been exceptionally gruesome, with both the vehicle and Elizabeth herself left nearly unrecognizable in the aftermath. Metal and flesh had been so entwined around each other that separating the two had been an arduous nightmare. “The result of a seizure,” the doctor had said, though Elizabeth never had a history of epilepsy.

“As it happens,” Elazul sneered under his breath, in a brazen mockery of the doctor, as he opened the chapel door and left the room. He regularly visited Eleanor’s chapel. The routine was easy enough to maintain since the recent floods had left the Corpse Grove surrounded by a vast swath of water. In past years the floods had never lasted long; at worst the Corpse Grove had only been isolated for a mere handful of weeks. However, the current floods had imprisoned Elazul within the confines of the Corpse Grove for months. Fortunately, the Corpse Grove Manor always had a vast stockpile of food within its storage rooms.

Elazul was finishing a tough piece of jerky that cool autumn morning as exited the Corpse Grove Manor. The fog he stepped into was thick and unrelenting. Even with the hazy wisps obscuring his vision, Elazul could still make out a few of the Corpse Grove’s infamous trees. They were a sickly white, with even their leaves devoid of all color.

The absence of color was also what marked the trees as vampires. They were the parasites that needed to siphon the life of any other flora they could wind their roots around. As a child, Elazul had found their uniform whiteness to be unappealing. He found the trees beyond the Corpse Grove far more beautiful with their vibrant green leaves that turned the color of fire during the autumn.

Now that he was older, Elazul could appreciate the haunting charm of the Corpse Grove. The trees reminded him of the pillars in a cathedral, and the accompanying calm of the woods brought Elazul a sense of peace that he was often unable to find within the walls of the manor itself.

The ground beneath his feet was soaked with the previous day’s rain, and he carefully sidestepped puddle after puddle along the dirt road. No matter how many weeks passed, the endless expanse of floodwater persisted, and as a result the road to leave the Corpse Grove was completely submerged. Everything beyond the forest felt akin to a distant memory, but Elazul still made a point of regularly checking to see if he could finally flee his imprisonment. He was restless and desperate for any sign that he could return to the world beyond the Corpse Grove.

Elazul hadn’t wanted to reside in the Corpse Grove Manor to begin with. Even though he had inherited the aging monstrosity after Eleanor’s death he’d never intended to so much as look at the manor again. But the floods had been preceded by the plague, and Elazul had fled to the Corpse Grove Manor when he’d realized just how destructive the sickness was.

The Corpse Grove was named as such because the pale trees were thought to resemble the corpses of the freshly dead, but the bodies left in the wake of the plague looked nothing like those trees. The sickness consumed the flesh of those it infected and left them decomposing even as their lungs still struggled for breath. The people that died from the disease weren’t left as the romanticized ideal of a corpse; they were left as a patchwork abomination of pus and blood. They were the agonized beings of wounds never able to heal.

The last body that Elazul had witnessed had been his neighbor’s. He had been a kind man and had spent his retirement tending to a quaint garden of tomatoes and peppers, but the plague had robbed him of that life. It had left a body disfigured beyond recognition in its stead. Elazul had only been able to identify the corpse by the distinctive green ring on its left hand. That same ring had been his neighbor’s wedding ring, a memento of the life he’d shared with his wife.

The sight of that ruined corpse had been too much for Elazul, and he’d fled to the Corpse Grove Manor that very night. He sometimes saw his neighbor’s body in his dreams, as rotted as it had been in the waking world.

The dreams couldn’t touch him as he walked through the Corpse Grove, and the floodwaters before him were cool and gray—the surface as still as glass. “Hello again,” he greeted the water. Disturbed droplets scattered into the air as he kicked at the water with the scuffed toe of his boot. The floodwaters were as unyielding as they were every previous day.

Elazul crouched down to gaze upon the water, as though he could force it recede through sheer force of his thoughts alone. If the flood knew his will then it didn’t acknowledge it. Elazul let his eyes wander before letting them finally settle upon the reflection before him.

He resembled his great-grandmother more than any other member of his family ever did. He had her same high cheekbones and dark eyes, but his deep red hair was wavier than Eleanor’s had ever been. They both had the sleek and sharp-featured appearance of archetypal vampires. When Elazul looked down upon his reflection he could almost see Eleanor herself. His frown was similar to the one that occasionally marred Eleanor’s ageless face.

The pain of grief struck Elazul. He missed his great-grandmother. For as cold as she was, she had been a source of intelligence and wisdom that so few people were capable of, and he longed for it. Between the unnatural floods and the plague, Elazul felt as though he was stumbling through an incomprehensible world, and he craved the stabilizing force that had been Eleanor.

Elazul rose to his feet, dusted the dirt off his pants, and turned around to return to the manor. As he walked away, the reflection that was simultaneously Eleanor and Elazul remained upon the still water.

* * *

The doe carcass was bloated, and its eyes were missing from its wide sockets. The fauna rarely ventured close to the manor, but the decaying creature was sprawled out before the house’s main entrance. The belly was split open, and its entrails were spilled out upon the sidewalk. Flies swarmed the gruesome sight in their desperation to both feed and lay the eggs of their next swarm. Blood oozed from the animal and seeped into the crevices of the brickwork around it. On top of that, the stench of death was growing.

Elazul looked away from the tableau. The strewn-out viscera was too grisly a sight for him. He enjoyed horror movies well enough, but those sights were artificial and contained within the television screen. The dead doe was mere feet from him as it rotted and collected flies in the sunlight.

In fact, Elazul briefly considered leaving the corpse to rot. As repulsive as the thought of handling the corpse was though, he knew he couldn’t leave it be. The smell alone was already trying to seep into the manor.

He crouched down to assess the condition of the body. The doe looked to be about a hundred pounds, and he wasn’t sure how easily he would be able to move the carcass. Elazul never had much luck with lifting heavy objects, even prior to his isolation. The shed in the garden had a wheelbarrow that he could try loading the dead animal into, but he felt a wave of nausea upon the thought of hauling the oozing, fly-addled body into his arms.

Once Elazul finally resigned himself to moving the doe, he disappeared back into the house to fetch his raincoat and a set of kitchen gloves. He dressed himself in the improvised protective gear, and he then ventured to the shed to grab the wheelbarrow. One of the wheels kept locking into place as he rolled it to the corpse.

The doe’s weight was more than Elazul had initially expected, and he bit down upon his bottom lip as he struggled to lift the body into the wheelbarrow. The animal’s intestines continued to spill from the open abdomen. Elazul fought every urge to gag as they brushed against the raincoat. Some of the flies scattered from the decay and clung to him instead. One landed upon his flushed cheek.

Elazul exhaled with relief as he finally settled his burden into the wheelbarrow. Fortunately, rigor mortis had passed, so the animal nestled into the wheelbarrow with a surprising ease. Unfortunately, the wheelbarrow became cumbersome and unwieldy once it carried the full weight of the corpse. The wheel continued to stick; time and time again Elazul stumbled with each sudden halt, but he always caught himself before he lost control of his cargo.

That was, until he tripped over a loose brick while making his way into the depths of the forest. Elazul fell forward and collapsed onto the ground, and his knees collided painfully against the earth. With his grip no longer keeping the wheelbarrow stable, the cart no longer could remain upright. The wheelbarrow tilted towards him, and the doe corpse spilled from its containment.

Flies scattered in the air. Rotting fluids and maggots escaped the rancid flesh. Elazul then realized with repulsion that they were encroaching upon him. The small and white creatures clung to the raincoat and gloves, and he could feel some of them against his bare skin as they disappeared beneath the sleeves. He looked up and gazed upon the doe’s head, the hideous sight inches from his own. With the corpse so close he could see even more maggots within its vacant eye sockets.He could see the rotten blood—both dried and wet—that lined its eroding mouth.

Elazul could feel vomit gurgle at the back of his throat as he reeled away from the decay, but he couldn’t even cover his mouth in response to that urge, not with his maggot-covered hands. He could feel something damp squirm upon his face. Flies hovered before him. He bolted to his feet, and his legs shook as he stumbled away from the corpse.

Elazul barely reached the bushes before his nausea overwhelmed him, and he heaved into the undergrowth of the white forest. He gagged helplessly for several long moments, and even after his heaves subsided he still found himself unable to look back at the rotting animal. He wanted nothing more than to tear off the raincoat and gloves, toss them before that corpse, and return to the deathless sanctuary of the manor.

He knew that he couldn’t. The corpse was still so close to the house. That knowledge was at the forefront of Elazul’s mind, and he felt miserable as he turned to face the doe. His limbs felt heavy as he trudged back to the body. Both anger as well as adrenaline began to pump in his veins as he took the carcass back into his arms and dumped it back into the wheelbarrow. He wanted to retch again as he watched the maggots writhe upon his arms, but he forced himself to continue carting the dead animal into the depths of the Corpse Grove.

When he finally got deep enough into the forest he deposited the body with more force than necessary. Some of the flies latched onto his raincoat and face in the process, and they crawled upon him even as he returned to the manor.

Elazul made a point of tossing the raincoat and gloves into the garbage before he so much as set foot in the house.

* * *

The flies never left the manor after that awful day. They wafted aimlessly through the house in search of their meal, but Elazul found them most frequently at the chapel’s door. When enough collected he would spray them down with what little bug killer he could be found in the house, but they always returned to that door in droves.

Elazul occasionally wondered if a small animal had died within the chapel walls, but he was never able to pinpoint any sign of decay. The flies simply continued to swarm around the chapel, all without the slightest hint of rot.

The flies were not the only new peculiarity within the confines of the manor. Elazul’s dreams had also become much stranger. Every time he fell into a slumber he rose in an alternate version of the Corpse Grove Manor. Unlike the manor of the waking world, the one in his dreams was bustling with activity. Music filled the air, and people in elaborate costumes ventured from room to room.

Elazul was never phased by the continuous party for in his dreams the festivities felt perfectly reasonable. They felt more more real than his months of isolation. Even the wine glass being shoved into his hand by one of the dream’s revelers seemed ordinary.

“You really do look like Eleanor,” the reveler remarked. His voice halted at the occasional syllable, as though his vocal chords weren’t designed for speech and instead struggled with even the most basic of words. His voice was otherwise deep and methodical though, and Elazul found himself reminded of the hum of power lines.

The reveler’s hand combed through the unkempt waves of Elazul’s hair. Upon closer observation the hand only bore a superficial resemblance to that of a human’s. The dark skin was in fact a chitinous shell; the candlelight caught the hints of a metallic sheen. The fingers were segmented in the same manner as an insect’s leg, and those very digits curled around a lock of Elazul’s red mane.

“I’ve been told that,” he answered. “I don’t know if you’re aware. She passed away not too long ago.” The fingers tangled in the red wisp and tugged on the strands.

“Not in any way that matters,” the reveler chided. “You know Eleanor, do you truly believe that death would be her end? There are secrets within these walls that you have yet to unearth.” His compound eyes were the same milky blue as the hallway’s walls, without so much as a hint of sclerae.

Elazul hummed to himself before he took a sip of the wine. It was a merlot, the kind that Eleanor favored in life. “I don’t think she was so stubborn that she could have somehow cheated death,” he answered carefully. The man’s fingers moved from his hair and to his neck, and Elazul closed his eyes in response. The man’s interest was obvious beneath the veneer of the polite conversation. Fortunately, his interest was a returned sentiment. Elazul also found him lovely enough with his tall stature and deep voice. The hard shell of the man’s fingertips felt pleasant as they pressed against his soft skin.

“Perhaps,” the man answered, though Elazul suspected that his response was an attempt at appeasement. “I suppose that we’ll both find out in due time.” His fingers moved downward, and they teased at the collar of Elazul’s shirt. “But until then, I think we both want the same thing, don’t we?”

Elazul didn’t need the man to ask again. He sat the wineglass down upon the low bookshelf beside them. “We do,” he replied. “Fuck me.”

Those two words were all that the reveler needed to hear. He moved in for the kill, and Elazul found himself pressed up against the door behind him—the chapel’s door. Segmented hands gripped his wrists and pinned them above his head. A second set of hands that Elazul was certain he hadn’t seen previously roamed down his sides. The lips that devoured his own revealed themselves to be an imitation of the human form. The elaborate mandibles nipped and bit at his flesh while a slimy proboscis slipped into his mouth.

The appendage was far longer than a tongue, and Elazul gagged as it slithered down his throat. His own drool mixed with the reveler’s and dribbled down his chin. The man pushed his knee between his legs. His pink tongue rubbed along the bottom of the proboscis.

He could feel the tickle of fly legs as one left the chapel door and instead landed upon his forehead, but the sensation felt far-off. It felt as thought it was walking along a body other than his own. More prevalent was the proboscis that probed for his deepest recesses for several long moments, long moments before it finally relented and instead started to fuck his throat. Elazul could feel the reveler’s hands upon his trousers, could feel them being unfastened.

Elazul gasped for precious air when the man finally pulled away, and he watched as the proboscis disappeared back between those mandibles. The reveler’s eyes were fixated on Elazul with an intensity not unlike a predator locking onto its prey. Elazul thought that gaze was appropriate since he truly felt like prey in that moment.

“Let’s play a game, shall we?” the reveler suggested in a voice heavy with both lust and excitement. His fingers slipped beneath Elazul’s briefs and discovered the folds of his sex. “I want you to turn around and place your hands against the door. If you keep them flat against the door the entire time then I’ll let you in on a little secret. Does that sound good?”

One of those digits ventured between the folds of his pussy, and Elazul’s breath hitched. The touch of the chitinous fingertip against his clit sent a delighted chill down his spine. He found that the sensation not unlike a line of insects crawling along his back. “What kind of secret?” he asked as he forced himself to focus on his thoughts and not on that finger pressing its way inside of him.

“One that’ll help you navigate this home you’ve inherited,” the man replied as he added a second finger to Elazul’s tight heat. “Both in the waking and sleeping worlds. And perhaps another world altogether.” He continued to tease at the wetness being offered to him. Elazul, in return, moaned deep in his throat, and the sound grew louder as the man hooked his fingers to rub at the cunt’s soft walls. “What do you think? Won’t you be a good boy and play?”

Elazul shivered at the sound of the affectionate title. Something subservient and passive awoke within him, and he nodded his agreement. The reveler, satisfied, murmured his approval. He then pulled back, and his fingers left Elazul’s pussy. Elazul mourned the loss of those fingers, and he longed for their return as he eagerly turned around and placed his hands flat against the chapel’s door.

A pleased rumble escaped the man. He moved in close, pressed his chest flush against Elazul’s back, and his multiple hands tugged down Elazul’s pants and briefs. They both pooled around Elazul’s ankles. The cool air of the hallway ghosted over his heated skin and teased at his sex. One of the reveler’s segmented hands slid up to his chest and yanked the shirt’s dark buttons open.

Elazul’s nipples had already hardened into little nubs, and the reveler plucked at them with a curious fascination. Though his nipples weren’t as sensitive as they had been before the surgery that had sculpted his chest into a decidedly flatter form, Elazul still found himself acutely aware of each pinch and tweak. His gasps were breathy as he squirmed against the man’s ministrations.

Once the man had sated his curiosity regarding the little nubs, he sank down to his knees. Elazul didn’t need to ask what he was doing because the next thing he felt was that long, slimy proboscis as it prodded at his flushed pussy. The lips of his sex parted with ease, and the appendage ventured into his depths.

“Oh,” Elazul groaned. “Oh, hell.” The proboscis fit within his cunt so perfectly. He could feel it slither against his most sensitive parts and fill him to bursting. His thighs quivered as he forcibly kept them parted for the reveler, and a pair of the man’s hard-shelled fingers pinched at his clit. Elazul’s head drooped as he moaned. The sound was more primal than anything else that had previously left his lips.

He wanted to be consumed by the reveler. The way the man stretched his pussy drove Elazul mad and deepened his hunger. He wanted to turn around so he could watch as that reveler parted his mandibles and invaded every inch of Elazul’s burning insides with that overgrown proboscis. He pressed the soft flesh of his ass back against the man in a desperate quest for more attention.

Elazul’s orgasm rolled in so abruptly that he didn’t even have the opportunity to brace for the force of its impact. He tossed his head back and howled. His back arched so sharply that he deliriously wondered if he would break in half. His legs felt too weak to support his own weight. The reveler seemed consider of Elazul’s predicament though, as his hands all moved to his hips and thighs to stabilize him.

The reveler didn’t pull the proboscis from Elazul’s cunt immediately. He remained still as Elazul rode through his climax, even as the deepest parts of his pussy spasmed around that slick appendage. When the orgasm ceased, Elazul felt his strength leave him completely, and he sagged against the door. That moment was when the man finally pulled the proboscis from his cunt. The reprieve was brief though as the reveler was far from finished with him. The proboscis ventured upward from that red and spent pussy until it settled against the tight opening of Elazul’s anus.

Elazul’s heartbeat pounded harder than it had during his orgasm. “Wait,” he blurted. “Careful, I uh… I haven’t really done anything with my ass before.” He couldn’t deny that the prospect of that proboscis fucking his anus until it was left a round and lovely gape was an exciting thought, but he was still daunted by the reality of having his ass filled by that long appendage.

The reveler seemed to understand because the proboscis broached the tight opening with a slow, careful, and gentle pace. And the feeling of his anus being stretched open was an uncomfortable sensation for Elazul, even as the reveler’s thick and slick saliva eased the proboscis’s entry. His body instinctively fought against the intrusion and tried to force the proboscis out. The man persisted though, and Elazul cried out in pain. The agony had yet to peak though; it grew as the appendage pressed against a wall deep within him that set every nerve in his body aflame.

“God. _God._ That hurts,” Elazul breathed. His pained plea was cut short as it instead transformed into a screech. The proboscis had forced its way past that sensitive wall and into the curves of his insides. The reveler hummed in delight as he brought his fingers to Elazul’s wet cunt and pushed them back into that opening. Unlike his anus, his pussy was pliant and yielded to the fingers without the slightest resistance.

Only when the proboscis was completely sheathed within Elazul’s anus did it begin to fuck him. The voices of the other partiers in the hallway felt hazy and unintelligible as Elazul yowled. Despite the agony though—or perhaps because of it—Elazul’s arousal built up once more. He faintly wondered if he was a masochist. He had never thought of himself as such before, but the sensation of the most hidden parts of his anatomy being forced open and explored appealed to him far more than he would have initially expected. The pain enhanced the vulnerability he felt.

He looked down, and the sight of his abdomen as it bulged was surreal in its absurdity. He could see his flesh strain again and again as the appendage thrust into him.

Elazul’s arms trembled as he forced himself to keep his hands against the door. The effort took all of his willpower. He wanted to reach back and take hold of the reveler, to control the speed at which the proboscis pounded into him. But he also knew that in doing so he would lose whatever knowledge the reveler was privy to.

The longer the reveler fucked his ass the more sensitive and tender Elazul felt. He wondered if he would be able to come from the pain alone. The fingers buried in his pussy were hardly noticeable when compared to the proboscis’s invasion of his ass.

While Elazul’s first orgasm had been surprising, his second one was wholly unexpected. Pain, humiliation, and excitement combined into an intoxicating concoction of pleasure, and his anus clenched around the proboscis as he screamed. A sudden rush of ejaculate and urine trickled from his pussy and down his thighs.

After the second climax passed, the reveler carefully slipped his proboscis from Elazul and returned to his feet. He pulled his hands away, and without the stabilizing support Elazul dropped to his knees. The palms of his hands slid down the white chapel door. His anus felt loose and open, and if not for the exhaustion that seeped into his mind he would be mortified by how visible his insides had to be.

“Well, congratulations,” the reveler finally remarked as he drank in the sight of Elazul’s disheveled appearance, his red and ruined holes. “It looks like you’ve won our little game.” He grabbed Elazul’s glass of merlot, and his mandibles parted as he drank the wine.

Elazul let out a shaky breath as looked over his shoulder. The reveler loomed over him. “So what do you know?” he asked as his voice wavered. His legs tingled with the sensation of phantom pins being driven into his flesh, and he winced as he tried to shift to a more comfortable position.

“I am a man of my word,” the reveler conceded, and he leaned down with a flourish. “You’re about to return to that other manor—that one in the waking world—where not one of us can protect you,” he whispered. “Avoid the mirrors, and avoid water.”

Elazul’s exasperated chuckle spoke of the depth of his fatigue. “How do you expect me to avoid water?” he inquired. “I’m surrounded by it.”

The reveler’s mandible brushed against the shell of his ear. “You enjoy a challenge, don’t you? I’m sure you’ll figure something out.” Elazul heard the whistle of a boiling kettle from down the hall. The sharp sound grew louder and louder until it drowned out the voices of every insect-like guest and silenced the sound of the party’s jovial music. Elazul winced as the sound grew unbearable. The man behind him smiled stiffly. “For now, it looks as though it’s time for you to wake up.”

Elazul frowned, and he summoned the strength to turn around to ask what the reveler was talking about. When he did, however, he was instead greeted by the flocked velvet wallpaper of one of the manor’s living rooms. The whistle of the kettle persisted from the adjoining kitchen. He didn’t get up from the couch immediately; the fog of his nap still hung over him like a gauzy veil. The ache of his body was unfamiliar, but the drool that trickled from his mouth was only too common a sensation.

He looked around the living room listlessly as his vision focused. Eventually his gaze settled on the decorative mirror above the fireplace. The piece was a family heirloom, and the polished gold frame was comprised of lovingly molded vines that wove into each other. The mirror had been one of his Eleanor’s cherished possessions.

Elazul winced when he finally sat up. He felt as though the pain and fatigue of his dream had pursued him into the waking world. The kettle continued to scream.


	2. Eleanor

Flies collected upon the mirrors throughout the manor. Their blue eyes and gray bodies blurred together into shifting swarms upon reflective glass after reflective glass. Elazul supposed that made avoiding the mirrors simple enough an endeavor, but the sight of the flies everywhere made his skin crawl. The phantom sensation of numerous legs brushing against his flesh was constant and left him suspended in an ever-looming state of unease. Unfortunately, he’d long since run out of bug spray, and the fly swatter had disappeared within the labyrinthine house.

The hallway to the bathroom consisted of seven left turns, each one at a perfectly right angle. Each decorative mirror upon the walls was covered with those identical swarms, and the buzzing sound of the flies echoed throughout the corridor. The manor had other bathrooms—seven that Elazul was aware of—but the one at the end of the hall was the closest available. He opened the door, stepped into the room, and was greeted by a mural of water-logged corpses.

If the mural had existed prior to his imprisonment within the Corpse Grove Manor, he couldn’t remember it. The painting depicted lifeless bodies upon the white sand of a beach, with the dark clouds of a tumultuous storm in the distance. Thread-thin daggers of lightning tore themselves from the whorls of the clouds, and Elazul could only assume that same lightning was responsible for the burning wreckage of the ship still trapped upon the frothing sea. The flames consumed the boat’s white sails.

He returned his gaze to those painted corpses with their soaked clothes, with their hair clinging to their lifeless flesh in drenched tangles. Their eyes were as vacant and blue-gray as the flies upon the manor’s mirrors. Elazul despised the mural.

He made a point of facing away from the grotesque painting when he got into the bathtub of hot, soapy water. Elazul’s eyes slipped shut, and he breathed a sigh of relief. The heat seeped into his flesh and warmed him down to his bones. As he moved his long limbs they cut through the bubbles and revealed the water’s surface beneath the froth. His pale face and red hair reflected off the water, distorted by the ripples.

Elazul leaned back and rested his head against the tub’s rim. He eventually closed his eyes. And they remained closed, even as the water continued to ripple. The reflection of Elazul’s face remained upon the surface as though he had never lounged back.

The wavering portrait remained in place even as two hands, with fingers tipped by scarlet nails, emerged from the bathwater. When Elazul reopened his eyes, they were already clambering for his throat.

An ugly, panicked sound gurgled forth from Elazul when he saw those two hands, and he bolted to his feet. His legs hit the back of the bathtub as he hurried away from them. He stumbled, his balance thrown astray. And then he was falling from the water and onto the tiled floor. The force of the impact knocked the breath from his lungs. With that air torn from his body, Elazul could only rasp as he laid helplessly upon his back. He looked up at the ceiling, and then back to the bathtub, all while caught in the quagmire of his disorientation.

The hands grabbed the edge of the bathtub for purchase, and then, so very slowly, someone rose from the bath. Red hair, darkened by the water, clung to the person’s pale face and shoulders. Droplets rolled down their heavy breasts, down the curve of their back. They smoothed the soap and water away from their lovely face.

The person murmured a couple short words to themselves, with their voice lilted by satisfaction, and only then did they look over their shoulder. Look upon Elazul. The face was familiar. The last time he had seen it was at his great-grandmother’s funeral, when it was as devoid of life as the corpses strewn across the mural.

“…Grandma?” he wheezed as his breath returned to him. “Eleanor?”

The woman tilted her head as she took in his soaked and alarmed appearance. Then, at long last, she smiled. “Elazul,” she cooed. “How long has it been?”

A thunderous roar, one that would have matched the mural’s stormy scene, pounded in Elazul’s ears. Eleanor had died months ago; the funeral had ended with her embalmed body being lowered into the dark earth. Therefore he knew, for all that this woman resembled Eleanor, she couldn’t actually be Eleanor. His mind was overwhelmed with this discrepancy between what he knew and what he was seeing. “You’re dead,” he remarked in his bewilderment. He then sat up with a lurch.

Eleanor stepped out of the bathtub. Water dripped from her body and formed small puddles upon the tiles. “Now, Elazul,” she said gently, as though to soothe a frightened animal, “how can I be dead when I’m right here?” She approached him with slow, deliberate steps before she reached out to him with one of her delicate hands. She could have been a ghost manifested to haunt Elazul.

And—understandably so—the benevolent gesture was too much for Elazul in his erratic state. He smacked the hand aside as he shrank away from her, frightened. His movements were clumsy as he stumbled to his feet. He then ran. He fled the bathroom and down the long hall.

He could hear Eleanor call his name from behind him, back in that bathroom, but he kept running. The flies had vacated the mirrors, and they formed thick clouds in the air. The swarms parted as Elazul ran past them. He stumbled and skidded as he sprinted through each turn of the hallway. Every angle he passed, however, only led him to another equally sharp turn. He knew he had to be approaching his bedroom, but the door never came into his field of vision.

“Elazul,” Eleanor called again. No matter how far he ran, the woman sounded as though she was mere feet behind him. His chest pounded and his lungs screamed. The muscles in his legs ached from his terror-fueled sprint.

“Elazul,” Eleanor said. Her voice was steel, sharpened by his continued terror. She sounded louder, as though she was closing the distance between them. Had Elazul not been gasping for air he might have screeched.

“Elazul.”

“Elazul.”

“Elazul.”

Her voice was so clear and close, as though she was speaking directly into his ear. Elazul glanced over his shoulder to determine how she’d caught up to him. He paid for the decision as he tripped and collapsed to the ground. His knees, his shoulder, and his cheek hit the wooden floor with a loud thud. The sudden shock of pain, red-hot and angry, awoke within his prone body. He’d landed on one of his arms, and the limb throbbed from the impact.

Elazul could hear soft footsteps upon the floor. The sounds were a harbinger for the bare feet of Eleanor’s doppelgänger. When those feet entered his sight he could see that her toenails were as red as her fingernails.

“Elazul,” she said once more as she crouched down. She stared down at him with a stern gaze. The doppelgänger looked disappointed. “Now this is why you shouldn’t be running through the house. I know I raised you better than that.”

Elazul didn’t even try to get up; he remained a crumpled heap upon the ground. The woman clicked her tongue in disapproval when he refused to even glance at her. “Manners, Elazul,” she warned.

“You’re impersonating the dead,” Elazul finally spoke, his voice weak and winded. “You’re impersonating the dead, and I’m the one that needs to mind my manners?” He pulled his arm free from beneath his body, and he could see crimson streaks of blood. Elazul assumed that he’d skinned his elbow. He opened and closed his fingers, with the knuckle of his smallest finger protesting the movement.

Eleanor chuckled. “Come now, do you really believe anyone could impersonate me this well?” she asked. Her voice was as cool and methodical as Elazul remembered it. “Could someone truly mimic my looks, my voice, my mannerisms to this degree? And if so, why? What would it accomplish?” As Eleanor spoke Elazul caught a glimpse of her teeth. Her canines were unnaturally pointed, so much like his own.

_Odd,_ Elazul thought to himself. Would someone go through the effort of mimicking Eleanor’s teeth? “The alternative, that you’re not dead, isn’t any less absurd,” he responded. With that, Elazul forced himself off of the floor, and he resisted the urge to wince as his body voiced its displeasure. His breathing had slowed to a reasonable speed, but his heart still pounded nervously within his chest. “I was at the funeral. Your body was embalmed. I saw it disappear into the ground. You died, and you were buried. So you can’t be who you say you are.”

“Ah, yes.” Eleanor looked thoughtful as she considered Elazul’s words. “My death. I can’t say that I recall much of it. It felt as though I had fallen asleep, and I had been dreaming until just moments ago.”

When Elazul realized that she wasn’t going to elaborate he pressed her with a weary, “That isn’t helpful.”

Eleanor frowned. “No,” she conceded, “I suppose that it isn’t.” She looked around the hallway, at the polished mirrors and the flies. “Let me ask you this then, when you ran down this hallway, you had to take quite a few right turns, correct? How many do you think that you took?” Some of the flies took a reprieve from their restless flights to rest upon Elazul’s bare skin, but not a single one landed on Eleanor. She was untouchable.

Elazul couldn’t follow Eleanor’s thought process. “I don’t know,” he answered with more force than necessary. “I wasn’t paying attention to that. This house is a maze, so what if the hallway is all messed up?”

“I counted twenty-three turns,” Eleanor clarified. “Though I must confess I only remember this hallway having two, back before my death.” She raised a hand to gesture to the mirrors. “And these mirrors? Antiques, that I purchased from a lovely gentleman in Austria. There were only three in the set… no, in the world. They had been commissioned by a wealthy eccentric of a woman, decades before this manor was built, so the rest of these should not exist.” She didn’t even acknowledge the flies. “So we have a hallway with twenty-three right turns, each one at a ninety-degree angle, and the walls decorated with far more than the three mirrors that actually exist.”

She looked over her shoulder and down the hallway, as though she could see the bathroom at the very end. “Also, I never had a painting of dead bodies in that bathroom. The painter I hired for that mural, Louis Sullivan, was an impressionist best known for his paintings of flowers. Roses and lilies, mostly. And warm lighting, as though the flowers are bathed in sunlight.”

“You’re saying that because everything else around us is an impossibility then your being a dead woman isn’t any more unlikely,” Elazul commented. He felt the burgeoning thumps of a headache at his temples. He rose to his feet, and his pale skin was a painful red where it had collided with the hard floor. The marks would end up as a collection of dark bruises.

“Is that truly beyond the realm of possibility? I recall once telling you that this home, just like this land, is cursed,” Eleanor replied. “Just as we are cursed. Those of our family that attempt to leave our obligations always meet misfortune. And what greater misfortune would there be than to be trapped in a reality unconstrained by the very laws of nature? Where death is not liberation, and the world around us exists in defiance of the known?”

Eleanor rose to her feet to gaze upon Elazul’s face. They were the same height, with the swells of Eleanor’s hips and breasts being the most significant difference from Elazul’s own lean muscles. They could have been twins and not the two people with a vast difference in age that they actually were. Elazul reached out to brush a lock of damp hair from Eleanor’s smooth face.

“What you’re suggesting is ridiculous,” he told her. “Completely absurd.”

“But you’re thinking about it now,” Eleanor ventured. “And now that you’re thinking about it you’re realizing just how bizarre everything is. Not just my death and consequent resurrection. But this house we’re in, this distortion of our Corpse Grove Manor. I wonder, is the world just as strange outside these walls?”

Elazul turned away from her. “Don’t know. Been stranded here for months, with only my dreams and the forest to keep me company,” he informed Eleanor. “Everything’s been flooded. And there was that epidemic prior to that.” He brushed a few of the flies off of his shoulder. Now that his panic was ebbing away he felt exhausted, as though all of his energy had been drained from his body.

“And you’ve been alone this entire time?” Eleanor inquired. ”You’ve handled yourself quite well then. I’d have imagined that such excessive solitude would have affected your mental state.”

Elazul deigned to keep the sordid details of his dreams to himself, even though they were the sole source of social interaction that he’d had during his isolation within the Corpse Grove. Even for all the anomalies that Eleanor described, Elazul felt that his being swept away by dreams of partiers, all of them a mockery of the human form, was too unusual. He also didn’t want to divulge the sexual escapades he’d with the revelers to his great-grandmother.

“I’ve managed well enough,” he answered vaguely.

Eleanor looked thoughtful, as though a question was forming on her tongue, but she didn’t vocalize it. “I’m relieved you have faired so well,” she remarked instead. She then stretched her arms over her head, and a soft, pleased sound left her lips. “Now then, unless you intend to flee again, we should get those scrapes cleaned up. And I also would enjoy getting dressed. Tell me, are my belongings still in my dressing room?”

* * *

Eleanor looked ethereal in her deep green dress. The wide sleeves billowed from her willowy arms, and the gown’s high collar was adorned with an emerald clasp. She could have been an apparition condemned to haunt the ever complex Corpse Grove Manor. Elazul, in contrast, was unkempt in his wrinkled sweatshirt and tattered jeans.

She lounged upon the den’s chaise, a book in her hands. The embers of a dying fire glowed from the fireplace, and Elazul went to revive the flames. The chill was returning to the room. He added a few logs to the fire.

“You’ve become such a helpful boy.” Eleanor was looking at Elazul when he turned around. Her book was closed and ignored. The orange flames made her flesh seem warm and inviting, and her red hair glowed as though it were a roaring inferno. Her mouth curved into a small smile. “I’m glad. After we lost your mother, I did worry whether I would be able to care for you as well as she did.”

Elazul shrugged. “I’ve been living alone, I’ve had no choice but to learn to take care of things,” he told her. He stood up and walked over to her, with his hands thrust into his sweatshirt’s worn pockets. “You did encourage me to be as self-reliant as possible.”

Eleanor shifted to one end of the chaise to give Elazul room to sit beside her. He took the offered seat with a plop. Eleanor leaned in close, and she smoothed one of her hands over his shoulder. “I wanted to know that no matter what happened you would be able to care for yourself,” she told him. “Just as I had wanted Edith and Elizabeth both to have been able to care for themselves.”

“I’m sure they both were able to,” Elazul responded, and he ignored the dull ache that wove itself around his heart like a fine mesh. While time had distanced him from the loss of his mother, he still missed her. When he closed his eyes he could recall the sight of her round face and blonde hair. “I know my mother was, at least.”

“Oh, Elizabeth,” Eleanor murmured. Her hand smoothed over Elazul’s cheek and wavy hair. “She had grown into such a remarkable woman. I loved her so much.” She took a lock of his hair between her fingers, as though to admire the color. The color of her own hair. “Her death is a loss to us both.”

Elazul’s breath hitched. “Yeah,” he agreed. “A shame she didn’t come back from the dead too.”

Eleanor’s smile faltered. “Yes,” she agreed, “and I have to confess that it’s odd to me, considering my own resurrection, that the Corpse Grove didn’t grant her or Edith the same opportunity.” Then, so gently, she coaxed Elazul into an embrace.

That embrace took Elazul by surprise, but he didn’t resist the gesture. He instead leaned into the hug, as though fueled by his months of isolation and grief. Eleanor was warm. She was solid, tangible. He’d barely had the time to mourn her death before he’d retreated to the manor to escape that monstrous plague. And then, once he had found himself imprisoned with the Corpse Grove, surrounded by that endless expanse of floodwater, he’d no longer had any semblance of a support structure. He had no other person to express his grief to. He’d only had the revelers of his dreams, and they were more interested in their outlandish parties than the nuances of despair and loss.

He closed his eyes and buried his face against Eleanor’s shoulder. “I loved her too,” he mumbled. The fabric of her dress was soft against his lips.

“I know you did,” Eleanor said with a voice unusually subdued and soft. “You were always such a devoted, loving child to her. And… if you’ll permit me a bit of selfishness, I envied her for that.”

Elazul cracked his eyes open, but he could only see the green of Eleanor’s dress. “Because I was… devoted and loving?” he pressed in response. Eleanor hummed her confirmation as she pressed her cheek against his head. She smelled of gardenias, of Spanish moss and the dark earth.

“That, and so much more,” Eleanor confessed. “Your devotion, your love, your curiosity. Your compassionate nature. Your lovely red hair and regal face, so much like my own. I always thought that if I’d had another child then I would have wanted them to be like you.”

A second—unspoken—statement loomed in the air. If Elazul focused, he could almost decipher the secret words. “I wanted to be your mother.” A cocktail of different emotions sloshed within him. He was unsurprised, he supposed, but the back of his tongue tasted bitter. His stomach felt as though it had been filled with lead.

Elazul carefully removed himself from the hug. Being touched suddenly felt painful, as though her hands could scour the skin from his flesh. Words were beyond him. He knew he had been silent for too long, and he could feel the consequent tension thicken between Eleanor and himself. The feeling was unbearable, like a pillow held to his face. And he had to struggle against that phantom pillow to recover his voice. When his ability to speak did finally return he uttered a simple, “You raised me though, so you kind of did have that other child.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Eleanor responded. Her voice was back to its typical cold intonation, as though Elazul’s blatant unease had put her on a defensive. She turned away from him and towards the fire. Orange and gold flames danced upon the burning wood and made the shadows within the den waver. The fire transformed Eleanor’s dark eyes into something redder. Elazul thought of hellfire, of Dante’s Inferno, of Hieronymus Bosch’s elaborate paintings.

Elazul felt unwelcome within the room, so he stood up. Distance between himself and Eleanor felt necessary. “Anyway…” he began. His voice still felt weak and disjointed. He cleared his throat in an attempt to regain control of his words. “I was going to make dinner. Are you hungry?”

“I’m fine,” Eleanor responded. She continued to look at the fire. “I’ll eat later.”

She continued to gaze at the fire long after Elazul left the room.

* * *

The two revelers were so closely enmeshed that Elazul couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. Their hard limbs were bare with their segmented joints on display. The two were caught within the throes of passion, and they paid no attention to everyone else in the room. To them the world consisted only of that velvet couch they were writhing upon. The manor could have burned down around them, and they would have remained oblivious.

The revelers were both delicate, all long limbs and meticulous curves. Their metallic carapaces were silvery blue as the light shone upon them. The black gowns they had previously worn were long forgotten upon the mirror-smooth floor as one of the women pressed her long and slick cock into her partner’s welcoming cunt. She breathed a pleased sigh then, at the feel of that tight opening around her, and lowered her head down to the other woman.

Elazul watched the scene before him listlessly. He felt exhausted, even within this dream. The reveler from his past escapades, the man with the dark shell, pressed a glass of wine to his lips. Elazul parted them obediently, and the taste of blackberries and vanilla spread across his tongue. He then leaned back to resume his sprawl upon that chaise. He was the very image of a debauched noble that was so steeped in hedonism that he’d become numb to it.

The woman thrust into her lover with stiff, mechanical movements. She could have been an automaton. The grace of Elazul’s own flesh and bones were inaccessible to her. She rested her mandibles against the other woman’s temple, and Elazul assumed the gesture was an attempt at a kiss. That is, until he saw that same maw open wide, so wide that that full pout of the woman’s false lips was rendered unrecognizable. The woman then bit down upon her lover’s temple. The resulting crunch echoed above the symphony of violins and flutes.

A pained gurgle escaped the woman beneath her, but she ignored her partner’s visible agony. The carapace yielded so easily to her teeth that it could have been an overripe fruit.

Elazul no longer resembled a bored noble. He sat upright as he struggled to process the atrocity unfolding before him. The two were still connected to each other, with that unusual cock still locked into that pussy. But the woman continued to feed on her lover despite that display of intimacy, as though she nothing more than a delicacy to be consumed.

While Elazul was distressed, the reveler beside him was not. “As I understand it, praying mantises have a tendency to eat their partners,” he shared as though he was discussing something as mundane as the weather. “Not as frequently as humans believe they do, but often enough. When the males seek to mate with a female, they have to be mindful to not wind up a meal in the process. A hungry female has no qualms about cannibalism.”

“I… see,” Elazul replied. He felt nauseous as he watched that woman’s mandibles tear into her companion’s brain. The sight was too repulsive, too transgressive. He covered his mouth as he looked away from the morbid tableau. He could taste both wine and stomach acid at the back of his mouth. “You’re mantises then,” he said. He hoped his voice wasn’t shaking.

The reveler rubbed his chin. Elazul couldn’t read the emotion behind his compound eyes, but the man didn’t seem to share his disgust towards the lurid display of cannibalism. “Well, I suppose you could say we’re mantises. But only somewhat. The answer is more complicated than that. All of the answers are more complicated than that.”

The continued crunch of the woman’s shell yielding to its devourer sounded throughout the room. And Elazul wanted nothing more than to cover his ears in order to drown out that hideous sound. His fingers twitched as he resisted the impulse. He instead looked up at his companion and replied, “I’d like to know. But uh… can we go somewhere else?”

Mandibles shifted into an imitation of a smile. “Not into the show? Fair enough, we can go somewhere else to talk.” He stood up with a nonchalance that felt inappropriate. “Let’s go.”

Elazul kept his eyes focused upon the floor as he followed the man out of the room, but he could imagine the woman as she continued her feast. Perhaps she’d grow tired of that soft brain and move on to her partner’s long nape.

The reveler led Elazul down the manor’s winding halls, past clusters of other partiers, and into a library. Deep burgundy walls were divided by bookshelf after bookshelf. Elazul glanced at the bookshelves, but he didn’t recognize any of the titles. He wasn’t even sure if he recognized the languages scrawled upon the bindings.

“Here we go,” the reveler crooned, all easy contentment. “And you can hardly hear the music in here. A perfect place for our little chat.” The library was indeed quieter than the rest of the manor, especially since only a couple other revelers were in the room. They chatted softly from a far-off corner, all without so much as looking over at Elazul and the man.

The man also paid them little mind as he found a chair of dark wood and took a seat. Elazul remained standing as he instead leaned against one of the walls. “Now, what was the question again?” the man asked. He was the very image of mirth.

“What you are,” Elazul reminded him. “What you all are.”

“Ah, right,” his companion murmured. His brow furrowed as he considered the question. “How should I begin then? …Well, just like you, we’re connected to this land, and we’re born of this land. Our Lord, it can create so much. But like a potter needs clay to create their vases and pots, it needed a clay of its own to sculpt us. It had a lot of different materials it could have selected. There’s deer here, there’s squirrels and birds. But it developed a preference for the insects that were here. Something about them resonated with the Lord in a way that nothing else did. So, when it decided to bring us to life, we were created from the insects. And that includes the mantises.”

He leaned back against the chair and stretched out his long legs before him. The dark material of his trousers absorbed the library’s scant light. “I’m curious though. You look human enough, but have you considered other possibilities? What if, like us, you’re another work of art born from something entirely different? What if you started as a little larva or maggot, only our Lord to decide that no, you can be more than that?”

Elazul found the suggestion preposterous, and he resisted the urge to laugh. He didn’t want to be rude. “How does that saying go?” he ventured. “If it looks like a duck, and it sounds like a duck…?”

The shake of the reveler’s head was good-natured. “But even that’s not really true, is it? Not anymore. As humans keep developing new technological advancements, they get closer and closer to mimicking reality. If it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, well, it could be a fancy piece of robotics. It could be a lovingly designed bit of computer magic. And our Lord? It learned quite a bit from creating us, just like the humans learned from their experiments. Would it be so far-fetched that it could have turned an insect into a human?”

“Except I have a family,” Elazul answered. “Of humans that I know to be human.” Tension built along his shoulders, and he couldn’t will it away. It lingered, not unlike the ache of an old injury as a storm approached. “My mother and father, my grandmother, my great-grandmother…”

A thoughtful expression spread upon the reveler’s face at the mention of Eleanor. “Right. Eleanor M. Anthony. The first heiress of the Corpse Grove Manor.” His mandibles shifted into a mockery of a grimace. “It’s funny. I recall telling you to avoid reflections, and she was able to reach you anyway.”

Elazul thought of the bathwater and of his rippling reflection between the frothy bubbles. “To be fair, I thought you just meant the mirrors,” he answered flatly. “And you didn’t mention that she was going to appear from my reflection.”

“I didn’t?” The man sighed to himself, as though disappointed by this new detail. “I’m sorry, I must have thought it was unnecessary.” He drummed his gloved fingers against his mandibles as he gazed up at the ceiling. A mural of people fleeing an insect swarm loomed over them. Fear marred each face as those very insects burrowed into their flesh, leaving bloody holes upon bare skin. “I suppose the apology doesn’t help now.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Elazul agreed. “But you could make it up to me by explaining why her appearance is a bad thing. She’s been a little odd, maybe, but you make it sound like she’s dangerous.”

“Because she is,” was the reveler’s frank response. He didn’t even acknowledge the startled look upon Elazul’s sharp-boned face. “But if she had remained in the manor below, stuck with our Lord, you would have been safe. She didn’t have a whole lot of options for getting to you. Save for the reflections in this house, at least. I know you’re trapped here, unable able to get to the manor above and back to your true reality. So I thought, you know what, if we could keep you two separated then at least you would remain unharmed in your current manor.”

Every word the man uttered left Elazul more confused. He pinched the bridge of his nose as he parsed through this explanation. “I don’t understand what you just said at all. Manor below, manor above? My true reality? I’m not following you.”

The man tapped one of his index fingers to his head, as though to silently order Elazul to think about his circumstances. “I think you should be able to,” he chided him. “What I’m describing is outlandish to humans, yes? But humans aren’t in your predicament, and you’ve seen enough evidence to know exactly what I’m talking about. You’re an intelligent boy, so I’d suggest you put that mind to use. We can’t protect you from your great-grandmother, not anymore, so you’re going to need to think your way out of this mess you’re in.”

Silence hung in the air between them. The reveler had spoken with a finality that Elazul found himself unable to press up against. His companion didn’t seem to expect an answer anyway. The man instead stood up and straightened his jacket. “Now then,” he began. “This is about the time when you usually wake up, isn’t it?”

Elazul opened his mouth, but he couldn’t speak. It felt as though cloth had been pressed tightly over his face. As though another phantom pillow was smothering his voice. Panic and anxiety blossomed within his chest, and he clawed at the invisible presence.

When he pulled the sheet from his face he found himself back in the tangle of his blankets, nestled in the middle of his bed. The pink and orange of the sunrise was visible from behind the bedroom’s curtains. His heart still thumped nervously. He couldn’t shake the feeling of being a rabbit cornered by a large, ravenous wolf.

He looked over at the mirror, but he didn’t see a wolf. Only himself, the terrified rabbit.


End file.
